Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Wanna bet (Score 2) 22

It's quite possible; OTOH having drones flying over our nuclear plants isn't something we should feel blase about. Maybe a drone swarm can't do much actual damage to a nuclear plant, but the fact that people are flying drones (deliberately or accidentally) in a restricted area is bad news all by itself; it suggests either complete ignorance of the law, or bad intentions.

Comment Re:"Introduced by socialist" (Score 2, Insightful) 140

Of course.

Well, obviously.

It doesn't disproportionately impact black people, transfer private wealth to 1% of the population, treat non-straight people worse than animals, or spread trivially-discounted lies about scientific and medical facts... so it can't be from the mind of a conservative.

Conservative trolls don't do well here.

Comment Sure sounds like someone is being set up (Score 2) 84

This month: Everybody meet Paddy! He's going to use AI to rewrite all of our legacy software for practically free!
Next month: Our AI initiative has failed, entirely due to Paddy's incompetence. Please escort him from the building immediately and make sure he never works here again.

Comment Re:I've said it before (Score 1) 176

So how much money are you allowed to make over a lifetime? I assume that once you reach the cap that you are forcibly retired.

Nah, that would be gauche. Instead, we implement the cap relativity-style, where your tax rate increases proportional to the amount of money you've made already. As you keep making money, you asymptotically approach the financial "speed of light" but can never quite get there because in order to actually reach it you'd need to earn an infinite amount of money.

Comment Re:I don't that means what you think it means (Score 1) 164

Agreed. If you don't know what you're doing it's hard to even ask for the right thing or know what's possible. For example: I'm currently developing a system that uses a local AI to help debug internal issues. The initial incarnations of it were very slow to start up each command; clearly, it wasn't doing proper KV caching and was having to prefill every turn; it required patches on the llama.cpp fork and our API wrapper, and also adjusting the system prompt to keep variable content at the end. But if you have no idea about KV caching issues, how do you even know something is wrong with the backend, let alone what to tell the AI to fix? You'll end up deciding you need to upgrade the GPU instead.

(That said: "lovingly handcrafted" code is a hilarious phrase that should give any developer who's ever worked on a big corporate software project the giggles, and also, these software devs are clearly people angry at knowing they're going to be let go looking for revenge by badmouthing their boss to the press)

Comment Re:Reddits feeds suck, this wont improve them (Score 1) 40

Well, firstly I had a “follow only” feed when I quit Twitter in 2022 - I just want that for Reddit.

There were short periods when Twitter tried to make the algorithmic feed the default, but they always switched back to your personal feed being the default after outcry. So Musk hasnt fixed anything there, it was always there.

Secondly, no, I wont be using Twitter ever again. Or whatever its called these days.

Comment Reddits feeds suck, this wont improve them (Score 2) 40

Their current feed on mobile is a mix of stuff you follow and stuff they think you are interested in based on posts you interact with.

Which basically means that you are shit scared to interact with anything that isnt from a group you have already joined, because once you do, your feed is filled with posts from subs that are minutely related to the topic you clicked on.

For example, if I click on a post which contains an interesting local event story without checking what sub its from, and its from a local town or county sub from the US I soend the next week tellingReddit I really dont want posts from every fucking state, county, town or village specific sub in the US.

Or I click on a story about an interesting car event without realising the story was posted in a car specific sub, for the next week Im getting rid of every car related sub in my feed.

Right now Im doing this for UK home improvement and DIY subs, because I dared look at a specific story. Im getting recommended shit like home made pizza oven subs

My biggest method of interaction with Reddit by far, is telling Reddit what I dont want. And one single accidental click can result in hours or days of shitty mildly related content being forced on you.

All I want is Twitters feed from before 2022 - the one which just shows posts from people or groups you follow, and thats it. Why cant I have that?

Comment Re:My fingers remember vi (Score 1) 100

vim is the reason I had to give on up using a Dvorak keyboard and switch back to Qwerty. It turns out I'm quite capable of typing text in Dvorak, but relearning the muscle-memory for all the different vim operations was a bridge too far :(

Comment Re:Something wrong (Score 1) 76

But I suppose the real pressure comes from having to top everyone else with dramatic, over-the-top social media photos of [...]

Perhaps, but in this case the real pressure comes from having to justify multiple trillions of dollars of debt, using a technology whose actual scope of applicability is much smaller than you've been leading investors to believe. You can practically see the flop-sweat at this point.

Comment Re:Pluto is a planet (Score 2) 70

Thank god for that. It was hard enough to learn 9 (now 8) planets at school. Can you imagine having to learn all the names if the hydrostatic equilibrium definition held?

Since when does science work by a standard of "what is easy for children to memorize lists of"? Do we say "There are 8 rivers in the world, and all others are dwarf rivers, which really aren't rivers" to make it easier on kids? Do we say "There are 8 bones in the human body, and all others are dwarf bones, which don't really count as bones"?

That's not how science works. Science is focused on practical distinctions about how things developed and their physical properties relative to each other. Hydrostatic equilibrium is a very practical definition. The process of undergoing relaxation induces metamorphism and releases heat, altering bodies. You go to non-equilibrium bodies if you want to study the primordial makeup of our solar system. You go to equilibrium bodies if you want to study tectonics, volcanism, non-primordial chemistry, and search for past or present life. The boundary could not be more meaningful. Yes, there is a bit of fuzz between equilibrium and non-equilibrium, but the same applies to pretty much all scientific fields.

Comment Re:Pluto is a planet (Score 2, Interesting) 70

Supporters of the IAU definition (which I should add was a deeply biased sample, in that it looked like they were headed toward no definition or a hydrostatic equilibrium definition, so most supporters of that left, but the people trying to switch it to an orbit-clearing definition stayed) will argue that it's cleared if the remaining objects are trivial transients or in orbital resonance. But that's not what the IAU definition says. Also they'll point to the Stern-Levison parameter, but (A) that was based on the ability to scatter today's distribution of asteroids, not the primordial distribution, which included outright planetissimals**; and (B) Mars didn't even clear it's own orbit, Jupiter did. Also, in the paper that introduced the Stern-Levison parameter, they argued for a better definition where you combine adjectives and nouns (each with specific implications about the body) as needed to describe its size, composition, etc.

But the OP's point stands, in that it's stupid to say that something is a "dwarf planet", yet not a planet. It's like saying dwarf stars aren't stars or dwarf galaxies aren't galaxies or whatnot. An adjective-noun is almost always a noun, that's how language works. In the cases where an adjective-noun isn't a noun - say, "shooting star" or "slow worm" or whatnot - we treat these as scientifically erroneous colloquialisms, and formalize corrected scientific terminology. We don't do literally the opposite and have science codify misleading language.

Comment Re:moon (Score 4, Interesting) 70

Speak for yourself, Pluto is fascinating. Tectonically active. Cryovolcanism so abundant it appears to have formed large mountains by the merger of individual domes. A gigantic scar exposing its mantle, which over time roils in massive convection cells, pockmarked in sublimation pits. Mountains drifting like icebergs and accumulating on the shore. Penetentes (sublimation ice spikes), the size of large hills. A multilayer blue atmosphere, in which organic chemistry occurs, depositing not just organic matter onto its own surface, but that of its moon as well. Active glaciation. A probable subsurface ocean, in contact with rock. Conditions suggesting it was habitable when it formed.

IMHO, it's way more interesting than a number of recognized planets.

(Also, I'm confused by your response. This isn't about the moon, and the moon has no atmosphere for flying)

Slashdot Top Deals

Gosh that takes me back... or is it forward? That's the trouble with time travel, you never can tell." -- Doctor Who, "Androids of Tara"

Working...